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Thursday, July 06, 2006
Walcott’s Late Style
The Prodigal (2004) is Walcott’s latest publication, a long poem (105 pages in the British Faber ed) detailing the peregrinations of a Walcott-style narrator, sometimes an ‘I’, sometimes a ‘he’, around the American West Coast, across Europe (mostly Italy, but also Spain, the Alps and Germany), via a fairly long stay in Columbia, and eventually back to Walcott’s native St Lucia. The title alludes to the Biblical Prodigal Son. You know his story: he leaves home, blows his inheritance, and comes back begging his Dad’s pardon and asking to be taken on as the meanest of his father’s servants. His Dad is terribly excited to see him again; kills the fatted calf, and rebukes his other son – the virtuous one, who, having stayed home and pointedly not blown his inheritance, gets understandably narked by his brother’s special treatment. Says Dad: ‘it was meet that we should make merry, and be glad: for this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found.’
The implication of his title, then, is not only that Walcott has been wandering far from home (which, clearly, he has: Nobel Prize winners get invited to bashes all over the globe, after all); and not only that he feels he has now finally returned home, though the poem does have the air of a summing up of old travels from a St Lucian perspective. Walcott talks rather sternly to himself in fact: ‘be happy; you’re writing from the privilege / of all your wits about you in your old age.’ [p.99] He also tells himself that The Prodigal ‘will be your last book’, which is news, if true. But, no: because a couple of pages later we discover that ‘the prodigal’s home was the horizon’ [p.104], which implies that Walcott’s traveller archetype is not Biblical so much as Ulyssesian (think his dramatic version of The Odyssey; think, of course, his extraordinary and consistently amazing epic Omeros). I mean Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’, who is ‘become a name for always roaming with a hungry heart.’
No; the implication of the title must be that this process of wandering was in itself a kind of wasteful expenditure of one’s inheritance. Prodigal, after all, means ‘extravagantly wasteful’, although the Biblical tale means that many people now tend to assume that the word means lost. So what is extravagantly spent in this poem? What else but Walcott’s vivid, powerful and sugar-rich style itself?
What is there to say about Walcott’s style? Detractors say that he overwrites, that he overloads every rift with ore, that it’s all too sweet, sunshiny, drowning in a relentless sensory richness. There’s something in this, I think, but I’m not sure it’s actually a problem. Overwriting seems to me a valid literary strategy, something it’s possible to do well or do badly; and objecting to Walcott’s poetry purely on the grounds that it is overwritten is surely as greatly to miss the point as it would be to denigrate John Updike’s prose, or Manley Hopkins’s poetry, or, hell, Shakespeare’s verse, because they’re ‘overwritten’. It may not be to your taste; but it’s what Walcott does; and he does it very well indeed.
Mind you, he comes close to overdoing it in this poem. It’s as brightly coloured as a toddler’s playroom. For instance: here he is, back in his St Lucia house, sitting on his balcony and looking over the sea, the ‘cobalt motion laced with emerald’, and hearing the drone of ‘that silver insect’ amongst the flowers, ‘pale pink petals and blades of olive leaves’, ‘the spray-white detonations of the lilac / against blue the hue of grenadier’. The section ends with these lines:
A grey sky trawls its silver wires of rain;
these are the subtleties of the noon sea:
lime, emerald, lilac, cobalt, ultramarine. [69]
‘Subtleties’, there, really is a gloriously ill-chosen word. This colour-scheme may be vivid, it may be vibrant, may indeed (picture it as the décor of your sitting room) be 1970s-ghastly and vomit-inducing, but it is hardly subtle.
But this nicely makes plain, I think, the double-meaning of the poem’s title: Walcott is enacting precisely an ‘extravagant expenditure’ of poetic imagery and language. And mostly this extravagance buys a high proportion of striking and beautiful phrases: sparrows that ‘bulb along stricken branches’ [8]; ‘small crows / like commas’ [10]; ‘the sea’s tinfoil striations’ [23]; ‘the furled umbrellas of the cypresses’ [33]; ‘the uncontaminated cobalt / of sky and sea’ [54]; ‘a rainbow like a bruise through cottony cumuli’ [92]; ‘the iron rim of the ringing horizon’ [103]. On the other hand, sometimes the imagery seemed to me more puzzling than effective. What does it mean, I wonder, to talk of the ‘trowelled blue’ of the sky [61]? In what sense trowelled, exactly? And in Geneva Walcott reports that ‘the weather sounded like its name: Lausanne’ [16], which got me thinking. Is this, I don’t know, LllauZZANNE! like thunder? Or lauss-ss-ss-ane like rain? Or saying it softly (so it’s almost like praying) lausah-ah-ah-ne like a heatwave? I think I’m missing something.
I don’t want to get bogged down with specificities, but one thing on my mind as I read the book was the question as to whether there is such a thing as a ‘late Walcottian style’. I’m still undecided. There is, I think, a sense of ripeness that sometimes slips out of the poet’s control. For instance he overuses certain images (‘lemon light’, ‘coal-eyed’, ‘harp-like’ trees) and certain words (often words with a rather chemical bias: ‘cobalt’ for skies and seas; ‘zinc’ for noon sunlight). And ‘ochre’. The word ‘ochre’ crops up dozens of times, applied to landscapes, buildings, people, afternoons, to pretty much everything. I’ll be honest, by the end of the poem I was pretty tired of ochre. There was a particularly ochre-dense middle section (‘the ochre earth’ [54]; hills ‘all briary and ochre’ [59]; ‘the dry hillock … in the ochre quiet’ [60]; ‘the ochre afternoon … in the ochre country’ [64]) at which point I was haranguing the book as I held it in my hand, ‘Del-boy! No! Enough with the ochre, already!’
It’s a painter’s colour, of course; the label on the outside of one of those little toothpastey tubes of oilpaint, and Walcott is a painter as well as a poet. The problem is that whilst he’s one of the very greatest poets alive on the planet today, he’s only a mid-league amateur-style painter. More to the point, there’s an awkwardness in structure by which the landscapes he is describing are troped as text (‘the rain begins to come in paragraphs …’ 65; this comes from one of about a dozen passages riffing on this idea) are then also described in painterly terms. He drops painters’ names left and right and verily centre too: Courbet, Corot, Botticelli, Leonardo, Raphael, Rembrandt, Velázquez (whose Surrender of Breda picture is discussed at length). A hotel interior reminds him of Goya [31]; the Mediterranean displays ‘Botticelli waves’ [90]. This is all very well and good, although I fear the poem as a whole simply doesn’t manage to co-ordinate its textual trope with the ubiquitous painterly parallels.
In general, though, this is marvellous poetry; it repays re-reading and re-re-reading, and is stuffed with wonderful writing. The line chosen is supple and effective; a basically pentameter scaffold which Walcott treats with nimble leeway, shortening or lengthening as needful (in fact, a penchant for feminine line endings gives much of the poem a hendecasyllabic feel). The sentences are usually long, linking together subordinate clauses over very many line-endings to good, rich effect. The imagery, as I’ve been saying, is consistently vivid and striking, often very beautiful, meditative and vigorous by turns. Only I wonder if this poem doesn’t demonstrate a slight fraying at the edges of Walcott’s style: a sense, just barely discernable, of a falling away from the extraordinary standard set by, say, Omeros. Take this description of an Alpine landscape:
Wide meadows shot with lemon light under the peaks,
the mineral glint of distant towns, the line of the plain
ending in the exclamation of a belfry! [15]
This is, I’d say, very well rendered and effective poetry. But then again: is it really enhanced by that visual pun, that ‘!’ after ‘belfry’? (Just in case we havn’t got the point of the simile? What are we, idiots?) And again, even though this is still pretty early-on in the poem, we’ve come across that ‘lemon light’ once before (p.5), which gives its appearance here a slightly second-hand feel. Still, we move swiftly on from this passage to the ‘ochre scarps’ [15] of Lausanne, and over the page an ‘ochre castle’ [17], and then a whole bunch of other ochre things. So at least it’s not all lemon.
This is all, perhaps, to hold Walcott to an unfairly high standard; although it could be argued that it comes with the territory of being one of the planet’s leading poets. But I’d say it’s unfair of me (in the sense of not properly representing the poem) to isolate the poem’s descriptions of landscape as its weaker moments. They’re not. The poem’s weakest moments come in its presumably autobiographical account of Walcott as a dirty old man.
I say this not to make a moral judgment. There’s a commendable honesty in Walcott acknowledging that he spends a fair bit of his travels eyeing up attractive young women (‘dirty old man’ is his own self-description, 32). But being honest doesn’t necessarily stop the poem becoming rather wincing, as the narrator leers over yet another waitress ‘buttoning her uniform’ and ‘hardening that horn / of ageing desire’ [13]. This is a ‘blonde waitress in Zermatt’ [15], which (since Zermatt is underneath the Matterhorn) may explain, if not excuse, that awful pun on ‘horn’. In Pescara the watchful narrator reduces a waitress to doll-like elements:
The waitress moving among the afternoon tables …
a girl with jet hair, black as her skirt, red mouth
and cheeks that were brightening now with the sun. [18]
Another ‘young waitress’, this one in Rimini, has ‘blonde hair’, ‘jutting lower lip, its provocative pout’ and ‘Asiatic cheekbones’; and she especially stimulates Walcott because she is ‘a replica of my first love’ [89]. Now, there is something lazily sexist in ogling waitresses like this. Not that I’m in any position to cast the first stone on that score. The thing about waitresses, says the Neanderthal-core of my heterosexuality, is that they’re attractive women who, like, do what you tell them (‘could you possibly bring me another ochre-coloured coffee, please? Thank you!’). Leering at attractive women is a habit it’s hard for even the newest of new-men to break, I fear. It’s not behaviour that’s very becoming in an esteemed world-famous poet in his seventies, of course, but that’s also part of Walcott’s point. He doesn’t spare himself; and this kind of sexual expenditure, especially if it extravagant, is one of the things that characterises a prodigal.
For instance, Walcott describes an affair he has with a Columbian military officer (‘there was a plump and rounded body / in that olive green uniform. She took it off, / and, her hair loosened, she took me to her cool breasts’, 43). She is later shot dead as she rides her motorcycle (‘her lucky motorcycle’ Walcott calls it, which makes me wonder what would be needful to qualify it as an unlucky motorcycle), but the poem doesn’t dwell on this. Indeed it spends just as long on a chance meeting with an Irish actress in the Italian town of Pescara.
I who was reading a paperback of the life of Nora,
J. Joyce’s wife, from which there is now a film,
with a photo of the actress on the cover,
a film at the film festival in that city …
met the black-haired Irish beauty playing her
and told her that and I showed her the book
to our mutual astonishment. [22]
Seems that even Nobel prize-winners lust hopelessly after beautiful film stars: in this case Susan Lynch, star of Pat Murphy’s 1999 film Nora (which also starred a splendidly miscast Ewan Macgregor as Joyce himself. Is there any white actor in Hollywood who looks less like Joyce than the handsomely boyish Macgregor? But I’m getting off the point). Walcott is cagey here about what is, after all, a fairly minor coincidence (‘all it meant,’ he admits ‘is that we were both here at the festival’); but he goes on:
I liked to believe
That she was Nora, and not that I was Joyce,
But to be reading the paper with her picture
in the basic, salty furniture of the lobby
… seemed to me a miracle. [22]
‘Miracle’ is a curious overstatement. But the frisson here, which Walcott can’t quite let go (he keeps reverting, in the poem, to the fact that he got her to sign the book he was reading, and that he therefore owns ‘the Irish beauty’s signature’ [88]) is surely erotic. If he were Joyce, and she were Nora, he’d presumably get some of Joyce’s famously non-conjugal access. But referring to Lynch not by her name but instead by this frankly patronizing phrase ‘the Irish beauty’, as if she were a racehorse, is one indication that Walcott’s judgement starts to slip in the company of attractive women.
By judgment, I mean, above all, poetic judgment. There’s a fine passage in which Walcott describes being an affluent flaneur in Venice (pages 30-32) that gets pretty effectively derailed by the intrusion of the poet’s libido. He begins by addressing himself as ‘Prodigal’:
your gaze was as immediate and real
as a concrete culvert or a plate-glass store
and the crowd, contemporary and simply urgent [30]
It’s a real, and really rendered, city, the narrator merely a shadow (‘your shadow was a footnote / in some boulevard’s infinite paragraph’) walking past ‘the glittering linen tables set before dinner’, where ‘a canal minted its coins’ – that’s a lovely image, that last one. Then evening, tenderly if a trifle garishly described:
The lights came on.
Petals were lit down the long boulevards.
As an orange disk drops in the violet sea
that a canoe crosses, as the candles bud
in the glass cases, your shadow grows enormous. [30-31]
But soon enough his imagination wanders into randier territory. He contemplates ‘the blue irises / of Ilse’ and ‘Roberta’s hair’, and ‘the startled eyebrows of gentle Esperanza’. And Laura’s ‘heavy-lidded, stone-grey eyes’. And ‘brown Isabella’s / tan.’ And ‘Roberta’s / lips parted in perpetual annunciation’. And then, as if there are really too many to mention, ‘all of those beauties, Paola, Sandra, Roberta’ [31-32]. This has to my ears more than a little of the flavour of that drearily laddish Mambo Number 5 song (‘a little bit of Monica – in the night – a little bit of Lisa – feels alright –’ and so on). But it’s not that Walcott is being complacent here. Memories of Ilse’s irises prompt him to complain bitterly of ‘irreconcilable things’
such as an implacable lust that came with age –
as a dirty old man leering at young things
in the name of their common, aye common, craft,
an old white egret beating priapic wings …
Irises in which I am never found.
This isn’t good poetry. ‘Common, aye, common’ is clumsy (‘aye’? no!); the ‘priapic wings’ is a bizarre metaphor that can’t quite shake off the surreal image of wings shaped like, or perhaps adorned by, phalluses. And the self-pity in that last line really is wildly off-kilter. It’s not just that it’s not actually true (being in his seventies doesn’t stop the narrator from getting plenty of sex as the poem proceeds): it’s that it’s out of keeping with the unillusioned honesty of the rest of the poem.
My point is that sex unbalances Walcott’s otherwise expert command of his own hyper-vividness, the tonal precision that is at the heart of his best style. At one point he refers to this poem as a ‘parable of my loin-longing, my silver age’ [68]. Tell me truly: can you read that phrase, ‘loin-longing’, without thinking of a butcher’s shop and something nice to go with new potatoes and gravy for your supper?
Less loin, less ochre, and more grey skies trawling their silver wires of rain; that’s my earnest wish. I hope it isn’t his last book. He’s an amazing poet.
Comments
I appreciate the post. Re: your first comment about “subtleties”: isn’t the word appropriate because the poet is describing minute differences in perception ("gray" versus “silver”; “emerald,” versus “lime,” versus “ultramarine,” etc.) that nonetheless register with him? The variations are subtle, no?
Adam, Your post praises Walcott very diligently, but the examples you cite actually tear him apart pretty effectively.
It’s as if you’re saying, “this is great, and oh by the way, this part sucks,... and so does this… and so does this...” You’re quite convincing that the book is a bit weak, though I’m not sure that was your intention!
I admire Walcott’s work up through Omeros a great deal (though there are quite a few bad lines even there); I haven’t really been able to get into anything more recent.
And oh, on women--Walcott has, it’s fair to say, a bit of a reputation for being “old school” when it comes to young women.
I see Walcott’s problem as one of *bathos.* In other words, his later poetry is “over-written” in proportion to what it is he is actually saying, the relatively trivial quality of the perception or insight. Thus his waxing enthusiastic about the coincidence of meeting the actress who played Nora Joyce sends him into a disproportionate rapture: a miracle in a hotel lobby! There’s no irony in his self-perception. He takes himself very seriously--another fatal flaw.
bil: yes, good point. I suppose I’d say that the distinctions he actually makes are not ‘minute’, but hypervivid and extreme (lime-ultramarine?) The larger point though is my argument that Walcott’s sensorium is not one that does ‘subtle’ (which isn’t, in my books, a criticism of his poetry); and you’re quite correct that the example I actually cite there doesn’t really illustrate that point
Amardeep: “Your post praises Walcott very diligently, but the examples you cite actually tear him apart pretty effectively.”
This is a shame, if true; because I genuinely do think that some great artists do brilliant and fascinating things with ‘overwriting’, that Walcott is one of them, and that the pluses outweigh the minuses in this particular text. But I don’t doubt that my piece doesn’t put that across. (You say: “You’re quite convincing that the book is a bit weak, though I’m not sure that was your intention!” ... quite!)
“I haven’t really been able to get into anything more recent.” I was turned off by Tiepolo’s Hound, which was mostly longeurs, I thought, and unengaging; but I liked The Prodigal in part because it was much tighter and more enchanting. And I know Omeros very well: for the last 5 years I taught a 2nd-year ‘epic’ class that started with Homer and Vergil, and went through Milton, Pope, Keats and T S Eliot to finish with Omeros. The more I read it the less I’m struck by it’s rough edges and the more my admiration for it grows. It’s not only full of brilliant, vivid poetry, it is trying to articulate something complex and interesting about history, empire, slavery and travel. Which brings me to:
Jonathan M. “his later poetry is “over-written” in proportion to what it is he is actually saying, the relatively trivial quality of the perception or insight” ... this hits the nail absolutely on the head. Spot-on. There’s only so far he can finesse that fact in the poem by reverting to the truth that a lot of travel, in this tourist age of ours, is banal, a triumph of stimulation over meaning or content. But it doesn’t stop the poem trying to revisit Omeros‘s meditations on history, and not doing it so well. He claims that ‘Dates, multiplied by events, by consequences / are what add up to History’ [The Prodigal 83]. That capital H is a worry; and as a definition this seems to me terribly thin. Worse is when he defines slavery a few lines later:
slavery being an infinity of endeavour
without pause or payment …
Is that a good way of conceptualising something as monstrous as slavery? Doesn’t it seem to imply (I’m a bit nervous of even typing this out) that the problem with slavery was that slaves weren’t paid and didn’t get holidays? Such that once you bung slaves the minimum wage and let them out of the factory two weeks in the 52 everything becomes alright?
See, that last paragraph of mine is not good. It is facetious about a subject that doesn’t merit facetiousness. Walcott has many and more penetrating insights into the corrosion and violence of slavery; much of his best writing explores exactly that. But just not here, not in this poem. On the contrary, in this poem objectifying the other, if she happens to be a young attractive female other, is something the poet can’t quite seem to distance himself from.
I’m conscious of the fact that I’ve now arrived at a position that contradicts my own reply to Amardeep, and indeed reinforces his points. I’d better stop before I dig myself in any deeper.